Getting Real and Web Development 2.0

I'm starting to read "Getting Real" by 37signals, "a smaller, faster, better way to build software."

And it turns out we already got real, from the start.

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

How else? We've never wasted our clients time and money with too much talk and presentation of what they want their web site to do: we just build it.

The book (free in HTML on-line, but already selling well as a PDF) will surely provide good tips and approaches we can use to make our processes better. But it's funny to read the manifesto of the new ways of doing things... and realize you joined the revolution before it had named itself.

An also potentially useful, and certainly more concise, look at how Internet applications are and should be developed came to the Internet by way of Marc Hedlund, "Web Development 2.0." Hedlund is probably a little too enthusiastic in presenting what "is" as what "should be," but the low cost and flexible approaches of testing enhancements on a subset of users and developers handling QA could have especial utility for nonprofit web apps.